Various products, such as digital cameras and digital video cameras, are used to capture images and video. These products contain an image sensing device, such as a charge coupled device (CCD), which is used to capture light energy focussed on the image sensing device that is indicative of a scene. The captured light energy is then processed to form a digital image. There are various formats to represent the digital images or videos, which include Motion JPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4 and H.264. These are all video formats, rather than image or video formats.
All the formats listed above have in common that they are compression formats. While those formats offer high quality and improve the number of images that can be stored on a given media, they typically suffer because of their long encoding runtime.
A complex encoder requires complex hardware. Complex encoding hardware in turn is disadvantageous in terms of design cost, manufacturing cost and physical size of the encoding hardware. Furthermore, long encoding runtime delays the camera shutter. Additionally, more complex encoding hardware has higher battery consumption. As battery life is essential for a mobile device, it is desirable that battery consumption be minimized in mobile devices.